brrrr.... fresno.... cold.... tomorrow morning i (hopefully we) make our way up to SF to see cirque de solei with mom and dad, which should be cool, and then I'm going to make my way back down to Fresno to drop her off to head to Vegas. I ended up getting her an MP3 player today anyway since I realized that she would be going to Vegas with no music, and that would just be silly. So now she has a new [128 mb iRock] that should keep her happy on a long, long car ride. I had originally intended to get her an MP3 player for xmas, then she said her dad was getting her, then he wasn't.... if he gets her one now imma kill the bastard. [ 12/21/2002 07:35:00 PM ] [ ]
Friday, December 20, 2002
The other day I happened across this...[Linksys WSB24 Wireless Signal Booster]. Linksys has some of the best APs and routers out there for home use, and this piggybacks on your Linksys AP and boosts the signal to the max. You can see a photo of how it connects to the AP [here]. With that and a good antenna, you'd have a pretty kickass AP. Who knows, if I get pissed off enough about building my own, I might just do that. [ 12/20/2002 01:43:49 PM ] [ ]
War....walking?
No, I don't mean walk-on-Washington protests or anything like that. You might have heard of [Wardriving], or [Warchalking], two increasingly popular geek activities where you either drive around looking for open wireless access points (or not so open, if you crack the WEP security), or you use chalk to mark an access point's location. Obviously, unless you have something like an iPaq, it's impractical to walk around a city looking for access points. Walking around with an open laptop isn't easy (though you can get away with it at Defcon, where people will generally keep out of your way). The other day I popped into RadioShack and saw this behind the counter [Wireless Camera Detector] Now these "wireless cameras" operate in the same frequency range as 802.11b (2.4GHz). So you could walk around with this little gadget and have it beep when you were within range of an access point, then whip out your laptop to grab the SSID or whatever. You would think RadioShack might market it as such since there are probably more 802.11b APs out there than X10 wireless cameras right now.
Anyway, it would make a cool stocking stuffer. Maybe I'll pick one up in SF this week and give it shot. [ 12/20/2002 12:50:11 PM ] [ ]
Yesterday I picked up a very reasonably priced Pentium I machine to turn into an AP (there are advantages to using x86 - like less waiting for new OS releases to support stuff!). When I got home, I read [this] which tells me...
Many of the PCI based devices require a PCI Bus version 2.1 or 2.2. (most older pentium boards use PCI 2.0 chipsets). You can download the below util to find what version your bus is for real: ftp://ftp.simtel.net/pub/simtelnet/msdos/sysinfo/conf915e.zip You will need a dos-bootable floppy for this to work.
Greeeeaat.... so it probably has a PCI 2.0 bus, which means I have yet more useless hardware! [ 12/18/2002 01:47:18 PM ] [ ]
Found: After looking around for PCI PCMCIA adapter cards for like two days (they're hard to find for under $40-$50), I ran into this [post on seattlewireless's hot news] page, which not only has the [adapter] (which lets you put a 802.11 card into a desktop machine of anything with a [proper PCI slot]), but it seems that [justdeals.com] has the [200mw] (this may or may not be the 200mw one) and [100mw] enGenius cards for VERY CHEAP.
Excellent xmas presents for your favorite geek. They list the cards as only being Windows compatible, but actually they work with pretty much anything (MacOS X, MacOS 9, Linux, Newton, BSD.... etc. these use the Prism 2 chipset). Get em while you can!
As far as PCI PCMCIA adapters, the [Techworks/Buffalo tech] one is one of the cheapest I can find, and the one that Lucent/Orinoco tech support quietly recommends customers who have trouble with Lucent's hardware. [ 12/18/2002 12:29:08 PM ] [ ]
Tuesday, December 17, 2002
Nope, not a perfect score. Surprised? Take the test yourself, dweeb!
I am 69% Geek Nerd, Freak, Geek, Dweeb. Sound familiar? That's okay, cause I will be the richest person at my 15th year high school reunion. If a "con" isn't happening that weekend.
I am 82% Evil Genius I am pure evil. I lie awake at night devising schemes of world domination, and I will not rest until all living souls bend to my will.
Can you hear me now? Larry has been trying to get some answers on wether he can build an access point on Windows 2000, and it doesn't look like he can. Funny! So here are some things I've found out in the past few months that might help others. Operating systems that you can use to build an access point: Both the current FreeBSD and OpenBSD will work pretty much out of the box [FreeBSD 5.0 RC1] : x86, sparc64. I do not know if earlier versions work. [OpenBSD 3.1] : x86, sparc64, etc but NOT sparc (nell/stp doesn't seem to be in the openbsd kernel for sparc!) MacOS 9 with an Apple Airport card support software base station mode, though apparently you can't do this on MacOS X yet.
Linux, though of course you have to jump through a LOT of [hoops] to do it. Larry didn't have much sucess here. You need the [hostAP drivers], you need to be able to recompile your kernel (probably repeatedly), etc.
While looking on [freshmeat] for something else, I did run into this, a [single-floppy linux-based access point]. Supports prism cards, of course. Might work for larry, and I might actually end up getting a little x86 machine for a couple of buck tomorrow and try this (I'm getting tired of waiting to build NetBSD-current to do it on the sparcs).
Here's a decent explanation of just what [HostAP] mode is. And yeah, the Soekris stuff is still [pretty darn cool]. [ 12/16/2002 04:57:52 PM ] [ ]
